Why Audiovisual Translators Downplay the Interpersonal: The Case of "Interjections"in English-to-Chinese Move Subtitling

This paper contributes to what appears to be an increasing interest ininterpersonal meanings in translation studies scholarship (e.g., Munday2012; 2015). Specifically it attends to the observed tendency in audiovisualtranslation (e.g., Díaz Cintas 2013) for the interpersonal elements commonlytermed “interjections” (and “minor clauses” in the systemic functionallinguistic literature) to be omitted or translated at reduced rates ininterlingual subtitling. We adopted systemic functional linguistic perspectivesto investigate the translation of “interjections” in seven different subtitlingsof the English-language movie, The Croods, into Chinese. Focusing on thefrequently occurring “interjections” hey and oh, we found both tended to beomitted but that this omission rate was significantly higher for oh. Wereferenced the SFL differentiation of “interjections” (minor clauses) whichvariously function as “calls” (e.g., hey), as “exclamations” (e.g., some uses ofThe Journal of Translation Studies, 2016, Vol.17.4, The Korean Associationof Translation Studies (http://www.kats.or.kr)108 Yi Jing & Peter R. R. Whiteoh), and as “continuatives” (e.g., some uses of oh). By this we were able toshow that difference in meaning/function does seem to exert a consistent,systemic influence on omission/inclusion. Thus, while the study did confirma tendency for subtitlers to underplay non-experiential meanings, it alsoprovides evidence that this is not an entirely automatic or “indiscriminate”process; that subtitlers are sensitive to the possibility that “leaving out” onetype of interpersonal meaning may be more harmful to the communicativefunctionality of the target text than leaving out another type.The findings of the paper are significant in providing a clearer picturethan is available in the literature as to what is at stake interpersonally wheninterjections are omitted in the process of subtitling, and consequently aclearer picture of how such omission can result in translations which aremore muted than the source text, or less explicit interpersonally. They alsoprovide useful new insights into a key feature of audiovisual translation thatof “condensation”. This is the frequent need for some elements of the originaldialogue to be omitted from the subtitles, due to the limited display time andscreen space available for written text. This effect has frequently beencommented on in the subtitling literature but there have so far been fewattempts to track in a systemic way just which meanings tend to be lost